This week, Axios reported that NBCUniversal will retain the exclusive selling rights for ads in Apple Stocks and Apple news.
This extends an existing agreement that was first signed in 2016. In that year, Apple closed down the iAd network, which also affected Apple News’ advertising business.
The company then announced that it had signed an exclusive deal with NBCUniversal in which the firm runs advertisement sales for Apple News. Individual publishers are still able to sell their own advertisements, but NBCUniversal deals with the rest.
The latest report says that the deal between Apple News and NBCUniversal has been extended, and that it will now also cover Apple Stocks.
NBC spokesperson Krishan Bhatia did not reveal exactly how much his firm is making from the Apple News deal. He did, however, state that it is a “very meaningfully-sized business” when compared to what the company does on Twitter, Snapchat and YouTube.
He also revealed that there had been a significant increase in the number of advertisers on Apple News over the last year, and that the total now numbered several hundred.
He described the Apple News audience as “highly-scaled”, with high levels of engagement. The average Apple News user, he said, spends more than an hour every month on the app.
Axios also pointed out that while NBCUniversal was doing well with Apple News, many other publishers were unhappy. The majority of small publishers that Axios spoke to said they were not making money.
Many lamented the fact that they get ‘millions’ of views per month on Apple News without making any significant money.
Apple News allows publishers to sell advertisements (and keep all the revenue) on their own content, but it takes a share of advertising income from ads sold on behalf of other publishers.
Apart from Apple News, there is also the $10/m Apple News+, where many publishers are less than excited about performance so far, though Apple has promised major improvements.